In 1969, more than 500 million Americans watched on TV as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to set foot on the moon. Although Richard Nixon was President at that time, Lyndon Baines Johnson had advanced space exploration with great effort during his term in office. LBJ made significant investments in NASA…
No doubt modern smartphones are far more powerful than the computers used on Apollo missions, yet such comparisons underplay the amazing technology employed by NASA during these missions to get us there. MIT-designed Apollo Guidance Computer was crashproof, operating according to a hierarchical system which allocated energy based on program importance; this allowed energy distribution…
On the third EVA, Cernan and Schmitt drove to Van Serg crater where they collected house-sized rock, took gravimeter readings, deployed more experiments, but ran out of both water and oxygen and had to retreat back to LM. Once inside, they relaxed. However, upon closer inspection they saw that the amount of sunlit land on…
Apollo relied heavily on aeronautical and hardware engineering for success; but software engineering also played an essential part. At its heart was the Apollo Guidance Computer located within both Command Module and Lunar Module spacecraft. At its time, this machine had the computing power of a pocket calculator and stored its code using core rope…
Southern Utah’s lunar-esque desert landscape seems tailor-made for Hollywood blockbusters, while also serving as an arena where some of the brightest minds in space simulation try out ideas about what life may be like on Mars. Near Hanksville lies the Mars Desert Research Station. This remote plot of land serves as an analogue of Mars…
Since its debut launch in 2010, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle has spent more than 224 days in space – becoming one of the only unmanned spaceplanes used by the Pentagon. As its presence has raised suspicion, including allegations that it’s being used to spy on Chinese space station residents or interfere with satellites in…
Armstrong and Aldrin departed their lunar module (LM) from the command/service module (CSM), then used explosive charges to separate it from both. Finally, using a guillotine, they severed an umbilical connecting their LM to an instrument unit and detach it completely from it. The Spacecraft Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard Apollo 11, aboard their…
As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 rocketed away, an eager crowd watched it lift off at Cape Kennedy. Following four hours of restful flight time, their astronauts started their first lunar excursion mission. Science experiments that measured the composition of solar wind were employed, as well as a laser reflector to identify our…
This PowerPoint presentation includes ten slides of information about the Apollo 11 moon landing. This resource can be used for whole-class, small group, or independent activities. After returning to the LM, Armstrong and Aldrin engaged its propulsion system to shift from their near circular orbit into an elliptical one before initiating their powered descent initiation…
